Opera Software's CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner explains why they will not release the Opera browser as open source, arguing that open standards are more important than open source. Von Tetzchner also talks about the company's antitrust complaint to the European Commission in which it accuses Microsoft of abusing its dominant position by tying Internet Explorer to Windows.

I can see the benefit of open standards - it would be a stagnant Web browser scene if the only thing providing Web browser capabilities was the Mozilla code base and you had to go through and figure out what it was actually doing, but at least you could do that if it were open source (which it is, of course). Indeed, the power of verification is there for all to explore.

I'd rather have open source, ahem, Free Software. The level of control is superior, the barriers to involvement are lower. Opera do themselves a disservice in several respects by insisting on remaining proprietary: the important GNU/Linux distros won't touch their stuff unless it's open enough (even Firefox only makes the grade rebranded in some cases); people who support Free Software don't care as much about some proprietary vendor's battles with Microsoft as they do about one of their own.

What still amazes me is that Opera is still around. It's not a tiny company, and it would appear that they've spread their focus in order to make up for the loss of revenue from selling the browser to end-users, even though there are some corporate licensees who haven't yet switched to something else. The resulting strategy doesn't seem particularly convincing.